Conor Gallagher is used to being underestimated. He’s been up for sale pretty much every transfer window of his professional career, still one of just three senior Chelsea players with a contract of three years or fewer.
He first joined Cobham in 2008 and didn’t make his club debut for 14 years. At 17, all his peers were getting professional contracts, but a mid-teen struggle with knee issues meant Gallagher was only offered a scholarship.
In fact, when a 17-year-old Conor faced his 24-year-old brother Jake in a game between Chelsea’s development squad and Aldershot Town, his own family member admitted: “I knew he was a good player, but I didn’t know he was that good.”
The England Football website somehow even rounds up his height to 5ft 12in, rather than 6ft.
As he pointed out earlier this week: “Most times in my career, I’ve had a point to prove.”
Part of the issue with understanding and appreciating Gallagher is not quite knowing where he fits. We understand tactical formations by in-possession structures, but this is a player who excels without the ball in areas we’re not used to seeing.
Predominantly playing as an attacking midfielder or No 8 this season, Gallagher ranks third in the Premier League for tackles and interceptions combined (43), only behind two defensive midfielders – Fulham’s Joao Palhinha (46) and Luton’s Marvelous Nakamba (45).
For most of his career so far, this knack for tackling has been accompanied by an over-eager recklessness which has contributed to no player collecting more Premier League yellow cards than Gallagher’s 31 since his top-flight debut in October 2020. He has only picked up one so far in 2023-24, but his 17 fouls are still joint-fifth in the league.
Yet this may be no bad thing. Before this season, Gallagher was shown a Premier League yellow card every 4.8 fouls, but this season it’s one every 17. He’s learning how to foul smarter, more tactically, a hallmark of great pressing midfielders.
This is just one marker that he’s progressing into a player of the requisite calibre to finally secure his Chelsea future. His discipline on the ball has improved as much as off it.
Of all Premier League players, he has the second-best passing success rate in the final third of the pitch – 88.5 per cent – behind only Rodri, and directly ahead of Declan Rice. He’s also had the fourth-most touches of any Chelsea player, after Thiago Silva, Enzo Fernandez and Axel Disasi.
There’s something romantically traditional about both Gallagher’s story and his style of play. Here is the academy graduate, a Chelsea fan from a whole family of them who grew up 10 minutes from the training ground, the youngest of four footballing brothers and the only one to make it to the Premier League.
Here is an industrious midfielder within the great English tradition reimagined for the modern game, a talent developed and realised through hard graft and a desperation to succeed. Here is Conor Gallagher, human Polyfilla, relentlessly pressing and attacking space like it insulted his mother, perhaps Chelsea’s best player so far under Mauricio Pochettino.
It is increasingly rare that an early career like Gallagher’s can play out at a club like Chelsea, that young talent is allowed to progress at its own pace. Of his Cobham cohort, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Dujon Sterling made their senior debuts in 2018, while Mason Mount, Reece James, Marc Guehi, Billy Gilmour, Tariq Lamptey and Tino Anjorin made theirs in 2019.
Every other outfield player from the 2017 and 2018 FA Youth Cup-winning squads, bar Trevoh Chalobah, left the club without making a professional appearance, a fate Gallagher must have sometimes resigned himself to.
It took four loans – half a season each with Charlton and Swansea in the Championship before seasons with West Brom and Crystal Palace – before Gallagher was offered a chance with Chelsea’s first team in October 2022.
In a footballing age where 18- and 19-year-olds taking top clubs by storm is not so much normality as expectation, Gallagher has had a linear progression seen far more often 20 years ago.
His first loan, Charlton, nearly didn’t happen – the club’s head of recruitment admitted then-manager Lee Bowyer didn’t want to sign him. Yet by the time a 19-year-old Gallagher had scored six goals and four assists in 26 Championship games and was pulled out of the relegation-doomed Addicks by Chelsea, Bowyer had changed his mind.
“I couldn’t fault him in any way,” Bowyer said. “Every day he trained the way he played. He’s been a credit and a pleasure to work with. He would have won our Player of the Year award if he had stayed.”
The Blues sent him to Swansea instead, where he managed seven assists while helping Steve Cooper’s side make it to the play-offs. He then spent 2020-21 with another side fated to relegation, West Brom, but had his first taste of Premier League football under Slaven Bilic and later Sam Allardyce.
“He was a clever player, somebody who clearly had a big future,” Chris Lepkowski of West Brom fan podcast The Liquidator tells i. “Watching him now, he’s a lot more disciplined with his runs. He was a little bit harum-scarum.
“That was maybe his biggest downfall at West Brom – he didn’t always know when to make his runs, he does that a lot more sensibly now. We look back on his time at West Brom very fondly.”
If Baggies fans liked him, Palace fans loved him. Their 2021-22 player of the season, Gallagher contributed eight goals and five assists in 39 games, with Patrick Vieira calling him “a manager’s dream”.
Every coach Gallagher works with appears to be almost instantly won over to his merits. Pochettino appointed him captain in Reece James and Ben Chilwell’s absence, while Gareth Southgate took him to the 2022 World Cup amid an incredibly strong field.
Southgate once said: “When you look at midfielders you often ask: ‘Do they stop goals, create goals or score goals?’ (Gallagher) does a lot of all of that.”
Everything Gallagher does appears to be underpinned by a tireless work ethic and good-naturedness. A fellow student at Howard of Effingham school, which Gallagher attended until he was 14, told i: “He was the sweetest boy – you could tell he was a good one. He was always polite. Everyone loved him and we were all proud to see him excel.”
Yet still, all this considered, Gallagher may once more be for sale come January. Chelsea are open to him either signing a new contract or finally heading elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, the Chelsea fan from a Chelsea family hopes and plans on staying.
And with every week, the chances of that appear to improve. The third man in a £220m midfield of Fernandez and Moises Caicedo having started every Premier League game this season, Gallagher appears crucial to Pochettino’s ever-improving Chelsea. His star turn in a false nine pairing against Arsenal was the next in an ever-developing series of examples he can rise to any footballing challenge.
Constantly learning and more disciplined both on and off the ball, Gallagher is proving Chelsea’s investment in his potential has been worth it. He is finally being appreciated as he should be.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/RlSI3E8
Post a Comment